Body of Stars Laura Walter (chrome ebook reader .txt) 📖

the blankets, which touched the quilt. I could hear the beating of my heart. It was the day before my sixteenth birthday. Time was moving forward, the future shifting, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

I pushed off the quilt and stood. Slowly, shivering with the cold of morning, I dropped out of my pajamas and my underwear. I avoided the full-length mirror, since reflections could distort markings, and looked down at the new future made manifest on my body.

My skin flashed before me, a swerving wreck of predictions. I shut my eyes, disoriented. The morning sun seeped brassy and strong through my eyelids. I could feel it—thermal energy, the hot center of the earth. I cracked open my right eye to see the sunlight shimmering between the slats of the closed blinds, a wavering vision of heat and salt and painful bright.

So this was high lucidity. I sensed the blood moving through my veins, spreading outward like the branches of a tree. I could hear it, too, along with the thrumming of my heart, the rustle of leaves outside, the wind coursing over grass. This was survival-level hearing, the kind meant for wild animals, for the hunted and the primeval. And then came the smells: an egg frying downstairs, a wisp of old bleach in the bathroom, the spots of dried toothpaste on the medicine cabinet mirror. I bent forward, gasping for air. Which I could feel moving in and out of my lungs, every ragged desperate gulp. As if someone had turned me inside out.

I remembered the breathing exercises I’d been taught to dampen the lucidity. A breath in, a breath out. Slower, then slower still. It worked, my senses narrowing to a dulled pinprick of their former strength.

With new confidence, I began my reading as I should have from the start: slowly, carefully, an inch at a time. First my left fingers, hand, and wrist; then the left forearm and upper arm. The vague markings by my left elbow were gone, replaced with nothing. How strange to see blank skin in that spot.

When I reached my stomach, I paused to marvel at the constellation meant to predict children. The open configuration indicated that children were a possibility in the coming decades, but that was it. The pattern was not specific enough to spell out the number of children or their genders, as my mother’s markings had for Miles and me, but I wasn’t bothered by this uncertainty. Future children were not something I fixated on.

My right hip, the place for career. I scrutinized those markings for a long time. The juvenile pattern indicating I’d work with Miles, along with the lone outlier marking, had disappeared. My career cluster still slanted downward to suggest an intricate, detail-oriented profession, but that could point to so many careers: dentist, horticulturalist, bead artist. Or a psychologist, I decided, since nothing was more intricate than the workings of the mind.

For the lower back I had to use the mirror, which resulted in many jumbled predictions about my future love life—an eventual marriage, perhaps preceded by two failed loves. Finally, I checked my sides. The skin of my right rib cage remained blank, but when I crossed over to the left side of my body, the prediction there stopped me short. It showed a diagonal, an arc, a pattern of stars.

A sound like static foamed in my mind, which fizzled into a faint ringing in my ears. I almost cried out. I almost burst into tears. Mapping the Future couldn’t have been clearer about this arrangement of markings: two diagonal moles for brother, a starlike pattern for death, and an arc of three moles descending in size to indicate three years.

According to the markings on my ribs, Miles only had three years left to live.

I drifted across the room as if underwater. For a second I pictured my brother’s face, just a flash of it, like a haunting. But I refused to give in to panic. I was going to dress myself, cover those markings, and from that moment on keep them concealed—from Miles, from my family. Maybe even from myself.

The clothes hanging in my closet seemed unfamiliar. I ran my hand over a row of shirts and considered the cloth, the distinction between each type of fabric. Every detail now was a distraction. I pulled down a turtleneck. From the shelf I selected a pair of gray corduroys, the ribbed cloth like a protective covering of tree bark against my legs. As a final touch, I wound a scarf around my neck. The knit was loose and soft, the color of blood.

A time would come in the future when I’d see changeling girls wearing knee-length skirts, short sleeves, even blouses cut to reveal a sliver of midriff. Unthinkable during my days as a changeling, when we were advised to cover our bodies for our own safety. I’d want to tell those girls what it was like for me: how I relied on layers, spreads of cotton and wool I pulled harshly across my skin. These were natural fibers, breathable but heavy when wet, and it was only when I piled them on that I felt safe. As a new changeling, I dressed without imagining the lightness girls might one day experience, or how their likeliest threat of exposure was skin growing hot from the pounding force of the sun.

*   *   *

My mother came to my room to make sure I was ready for school. She was still wearing her nightgown, and her feet were bare.

“Celeste.” Her voice sounded sharp at first, but then she looked closer and understood. A fleeting range of emotions crossed her face—sorrow, fear, love—and I saw her for all she was, every part of her. She wasn’t just my mother standing in my doorway but a whole woman with a past and future. When I thought of her losing Miles in only a few years, I was so grief-stricken that I got up and hugged